Text: Stuart and Susan Levine, “The Rationale of Verse - Notes,” The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe — EAP: Critical Theory (2009), pp. 127-143 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 127:]

2

doubt-vapors: Poe's coinage (Pollin, Poe/Creator of Words). Compare ¶112 of Eureka: “doubters for Doubt's sake.”

3

vexata quæstio: Disputed question.

Bacon's Idol of the Theatre: Poe alludes to Francis Bacon's Novum Organum (1620) X, xliv. In Collected Writings, 2:324, Pollin says to look in Book 1, De Augmentis Scientiarum, Summary “digested in Aphorisms,” edited by Basil Mortagu (Boston, 1863), 140, for Bacon's “eidola” to which Poe alludes in “Marginalia” item 196 (January 1848). Bacon's meaning is clear enough. In Novum Organum, see “Aphorisms Concerning the Interpretation of Nature and the Kingdom of Man.” Number 23 contrasts “Idols of the human mind,” which are “empty dogmas,” with “Ideas of the divine,” which are the “true signatures and marks set upon the works of creation as they are found in nature.” Axiom 44 explains “Idols of the Theater,” which are “all the received systems” that to Bacon are “but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion” (Burtt, The English Philosophers, 31, 35). Bacon wants received systems challenged. Poe's allusion is appropriate, though we don’t know why he switched from plural to singular — perhaps just a lapse in memory. He seems often to have quoted passages he had learned by heart.

“profundity” ... superficial: A favorite point of Poe's. See especially his story “The Purloined Lette” (1844) in which the critical document is hidden successfully because it is plain view. In the same tale, Poe has his detective give an example: When making a game of finding names on a map, the experienced player selects not words in tiny letters but rather “such words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other.” Poe's language here also echoes a favorite allusion. See our note for ¶9 of “Letter to B———.” Poe connects Francis Bacon to the image of truth in a well; Bacon's version of the maxim reads, “The truth of nature lieth hid in certain deep mines and caves.” Note again Poe's disapproval of Bacon, whom Poe a few years earlier praised.

4

the heading, “Versification”: See the next item.

“When ... hypermeter”: Poe quotes Goold Brown, “The Institutes of English Grammar, Methodically Arranged .... Designed for the Use of Schools, Academies, and Private Learners (New York, 1823). Brown has a brief section headed, as Poe says, “Versificaton,” from which Poe quotes. Brown italicized catalectic, acatalectic, and hypermeter and used a comma after the second appearance of the word syllable. The full text of Brown's section appears in Greenwood's edition of this essay. Poe quotes Brown here rather disapprovingly and without naming him. In the next paragraph, he is more favorable and names work and author. He intends to create the impression that he has surveyed the field when in fact he has hard evidence from only a single brief section of one book. Goold Brown (1791-1877) in an 1844 edition of his Institutes (like most successful textbooks, it went through a large number of editions) quoted the favorable things Poe said about it in his first shorter version of “The Rationale.” See “Notes upon English Verse,” pages 145-174 in this volume. [page 128:]

Poe had some prior professional interest in grammar books. He had reviewed the volume by Pue (see below) in the July 1841 Graham's Magazine.

5

Versification ... quantity: Poe quotes, accurately, the opening paragraph of Goold Brown's “Versification.” See our note for ¶4.

Bacon ... Comly: There is some disagreement among authorities on precisely which grammarians and grammars Poe intended. We made use of the suggestions of Greenwood (Rationale), TOM, and Thompson (Poe, Essays and Reviews), checking also for likely titles in standard reference works and examining a number of candidate volumes. Because Poe was mainly working with secondhand bibliographical information himself, in a few cases it is impossible to be absolutely certain. The works to which he alludes are school textbooks, most based on Murray's English Grammar. Most went through numbers of editions.

Bacon: Caleb Bacon, An Epitome of the English Language; or, A Catechetical Grammar, with an Appendix; Being in Substance Mr. Murray's English Grammar, Put into Questions and Answers (New York, 1819). It is not exactly, as Thompson thought, “an abridgment of Lindley Murray's influential English Grammar: Comprehending the Principles and Rules of the English Language” (Poe, Essays and Reviews, 1494). Rather, it is a brief question-and-answer drill book based on Murray. Greenwood (Rationale, 47) refers to “Lindley Murray's English Grammar, by Bacon, New York: S. Raynor ... priced at 10 cents”; we do not know whether this is the same work.

Miller: TOM suggests Tobias Ham Miller, Abridgment of Murray, a work not in the National Union Catalog or other standard reference compilations. This Miller was a newspaper editor whose biographical entries list no books. Greenwood's vote goes to Alexander Miller, who seems more likely; he is listed as author of A Concise Grammar of the English Language. With an Appendix Chiefly Extracted from Dr. Lowth's Critical Notes (New York, 1795)

Fisk: Allen Fisk, Murray's English Grammar Simplified ... (Troy, N.Y., 1822). The National Union Catalog also lists an 1842 abridgment of “Fisk's Murray” edited by Thomas G. Fisk: Fisk's Grammar Comprehending the Principles and Rules of the English Language.

Greenleaf: Jeremiah Greenleaf, Grammar Simplified; or, An Ocular Analysis of the English Language, 10th ed. (New York, 1824).

Ingersoll: Charles M. Ingersoll, Conversations on English Grammar ... 4th ed. (Portland, 1824). Greenwood, in Rationale, notes that this book contains no definition of grammar.

Kirkland: Poe's misspelling; he must have intended Samuel Kirkham, English Grammar in Familiar Lectures: Embracing a New Systematic Order of Parsing, a Nee [sic] System of Punctuation, Exercises in False Syntax, and a System of Philosophical Grammar To which Are Added, a Compendium, an Appendix, and a Key to the Exercises Designed for the Use of Schools and Private Learners, 53d ed. (Rochester, 1841).

Cooper: Joab Goldsmith Cooper, An Abridgment of Murray's English Grammar, and Exercises, with Improvements, Designed as a Text Book for the Use of Schools in the United States (Philadelphia, 1828) (Rationale).

Flint: Abel Flint, Murray's English Grammar Abridged; to Which Is Added, under the Head of Prosody, an Abridgment of Sheridan's Lectures on Elocution. Also, Murray's [page 129:] Treatise on Punctuation at Large. Together with a System of Exercises, Adapted to the Several Rules of Syntax and Punctuation. Designed for the Use of Schools (Hartford, 1810) (Rationale).

Pue: Hugh A. Pue A Grammar of the English Language, in a Series of Letters, Addressed to Every American Youth (Philadelphia, 1841) (TOM; Thompson, ed., Poe, Essays and Reviews; Rationale).

Comly: John Comley, English Grammar, Made Easy to the Teacher and Pupil &c., 15th ed. (Philadelphia, 1826) (TOM; Poe, Essays and Reviews; Rationale).

Murray: Lindley Murray (1745-1826), English Grammar: Comprehending the Principles and Rules of the English Language (1795, rev. 1818) (TOM). Murray was an American Quaker who moved to Great Britain and whose book was extremely successful. Greenwood, in Rationale, cites a later printing: An English Grammar: Comprehending the Principles and Rules of the Language, Illustrated by Appropriate Exercises, and a Key to the Exercises, 6th American ed. (New York, 1829).

Lily: William Lily (1468-1522). His Latin grammar (1513, with many later editions) is believed to have been written in collaboration with Erasmus. A royal proclamation of Edward VI in 1548 is referred to at the end of the title of later editions; it prescribed its use in all schools: Brevissima institutio, seu ratio grammatices cognoscencice, ad omnium puerorum utilitato/n perscripta; quam solam regia majestas in omnibus scholis docendam pracecpit. Greenwood (Rationale) so lists the title, following a 1776 edition of Lily; Poe capitalizes Regia Majestas and spells a word praecipit. Goold Brown's model, also quoted in Greenwood's edition is closer to Poe's: Regia Majestas and “Praecepit” are capitalized.

Lily's use of De Lonigo (see the next item) was explained in an article about printing in the Universal Magazine (London), vol. 1, no. 28 (1747). Poe picked up his information from Goold Brown; Greenwood offers an interesting Appendix 6, which explains the history of the accusation that Lily lifted “the intire [sic] scheme of his grammar” from De Lonigo. Greenwood adds that Poe's statement that “Lily appropriated a definition of grammar from Leonicenus” is a fabrication. Greenwood also identifies not one but three works referred to as “Lily's grammar.” Note that the Lily works are about Latin, not English, grammar. See Rationale for further odd misunderstandings, misquotations, and misattributions not especially germane to Poe's case except insofar as they serve to place him in a tradition of such practices.

Leonicenus: Omnibonus Leonicenus or De Lonigo, a fifteenth-century author. The work in question is De octo partibus oratonis (Venice, 1473). See previous item and Rationale, Appendix 6.

6

Pindaric odes: Greenwood writes, “The diversity between adjacent lines in Pindaric odes has obscured the exact equality between homologous lines in the strophe and antistrophe” (Rationale, 51n21).

10

Silius Italicus ... umbram: Titus Catius Silius Italicus (25 B.C.E.-101 C.E.), author of the Punica (ca. 100 C.E.), from which Poe quotes II, lines 342-46 (Poe, Essays and Reviews). Poe had used the lines once before, in a “Pinakidia” item (104) in the August 1836 Southern Literary Messenger (TOM). The Punica is a not highly regarded epic poem. The context of the portion that Poe quotes is that Perolla, a young man from Capua, plans to assassinate Hannibal at a banquet. [page 130:] His father speaks to warn him: “You are wrong if you think that because he is seated eating he is unarmed. He is armed. Eternal power, won in so many wars, so many foes slaughtered, arms him. Approach him and you will be astonished, for Cannx, the Trebia, the dead of Lake Trasimene and the monstrous ghost of Paulus will confront your eyes.”

The Roman consul, L. Aemilius Paulus, was defeated at Lake Trasimene by Hannibal in 217 B.C.E.

Pollin (Collected Writings, 2) discusses Poe's sources and his (or the typesetter's) alterations in the Latin. He says that Poe corrected “Fallis” to “Fallit” in “The Rationale of Verse,” but both the Southern Literary Messenger and the 1850 Griswold edition (The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe) have “Fallis.” “Fallit” is unambiguously correct. The construction is more or less impersonal; the second-person endings in the passage perhaps misled someone to alter “fallit” to “fallis.”

13

Sing to me Isabelle: “It is quite probable that Poe had seen a manuscript of Charles Allan's poem ‘To the Nightingale,’ printed in Graham's for November 1844” (TOM). It begins, “Sing to me nightingale.” This despite the fact that Poe used the “Isabelle” example in the 1843 version of this essay, for Poe was on the staff until about May 1842 and said in a letter of May 25, 1842, that he remained close to the magazine and to its owner even though his daily duties there had ceased. G. R. Thompson thinks Poe refers to the ballad “Isabelle” in Henry B. Hirst's The Coming of the Mammoth (Poe, Essays and Reviews), which Poe reviewed in the Broadway Journal in 1845. “Sing to me,” however, does not appear in Hirst's “Isabelle.” The rhythm of the phrase, which is what Poe discusses here in ¶13, is closer to that of the line in Charles Allan than to anything in the Hirst poem.

14

Arthur C. Coxe ... dead!: Poe quotes “March for Strange Music,” using a text identical to that in Rufus Griswold's anthology Poets and Poetry of America (1842; TOM). In the eleventh edition (1851) of Griswold, the poem is called simply, “March.” The text is again identical.

17

les moutons de Panurge: In François Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, IV, vii (1532-52), Panurge's sheep follow their leader into the sea.

German Greek Prosodies: Greenwood (Rationale, 87) cites as an example Edward Munk, The Metres of Greeks and Romans: A Manual for School and Private Study, trans. Charles Beck and C. C. Felton (Boston, 1844).

Liebnitz: Poe means Leibnitz. See list of variants; we corrected his spelling. See Eureka, ¶77 and our note. Poe alludes to him also in his stories “Bon-Bon” (1832; Short Fiction, 356, 398-407, 431-35, esp. 432n3; Collected Works, 2:83-117, esp. 115n3); and “The Man of the Crowd” (1840; Thirty-Two Stories, 120-29, esp. 123n3; Short Fiction, 253-54, 283-89, 292-93, esp. 292n4; Collected Works, 2:505-18, esp. 516n4).

18

Ex uno disce omnia: “From one thing learn everything.” TOM thought that Poe was quoting The Aeneid of Virgil, II, 65-66, inaccurately. Actually, Poe was using a perfectly correct generalized version of the phrase. Proverbial phrases are often universalized restatements based on literary original models. The phrase in Virgil reads, “crimine ab uno / Disce omnes” (From a single misdeed of theirs, learn all [the Greeks]). [page 131:]

20

delight ... suggest: Poe's quantification of pleasure should be taken, in Green-wood's apt phrase, “with a crystal of halite” (Rationale, 101).

21

Poe's argument here, as TOM noticed, sounds much like a brief editorial introduction he wrote in the Broadway Journal for November 29, 1845, to preface a piece by Walt Whitman. The Whitman essay is about the superiority of “natural” American folksongs to European art songs, an odd argument from Whitman, who so loved opera. They echo a famous but not very profound apples-and-oranges comment by Benjamin Franklin on the superiority of simple songs to the complicated music of European composers.

23

Leigh Hunt ... Uniformity”: In Imagination and Fancy (1844) Hunt (1787-1859) develops what amounts to an organic theory of poetry, arguing that in great poems there is both “variety” and “one-ness.” The sound of the poem, its “versification,” and its meaning are finally inseparable. The great poets have “the ear of genius.” In their works, though there is great diversity of effect “according to the demand of the moment,” there is an overall unity. Hunt uses the phrase “principle of Variety in Uniformity,” and Poe, despite his sneering in the present essay, uses it approvingly in his late sketch “Landor's Cottage” (1849; Short Fiction, 4:21-29,37-38; Collected Works, 3:1325-43) to describe an effect in landscaping. ndscape gardening, toe explains in “The Domain of Arnheim” (published with a different title in 1842 and extensively revised later), offers especially pure opportunity for poetic expression (Thirty-Two Stories, 200-215; Short Fiction, 3-14, 32-35; Collected Works, 3:1266-85). Thus Poe, as he so often did, picks a quarrel with an author with whom he seems in basic agreement. Even Poe's point about “the perception of monotone” was likely suggested to him by the very work with which he quibbles; Hunt said that poets used variety “for the prevention of monotony.” Greenwood reprints the critical passages from Hunt. For more on Poe's jousting with Hunt, see Poe's tales “Loss of Breath” (1832; Short Fiction, 471-72, 482-89, 497-500, esp. 499n18; Collected Works, 2:51-82); “The Angel of the Odd” (1844; Short Fiction, 472, 489-95, 500-501, esp. 501n3; Collected Works, 3:1098-112); and “Marginalia” item 179 (1846; in Collected Writings, 2:300-301). The ties to Hunt and “the Cockney School” are pointed out in Short Fiction (499, 501). Prescott shows that similar discussions of variety within a basic unity appear in several places in Coleridge as well (Poe, Selections).

24

The Latin Prosodies ... long: Greenwood (Rationale, 83) cites Charles Anthon, Elements of Latin Prosody and Metre, Compiled from the Best Authorities ... (New York, 1824), discussing the long vowel in Latin prose.

we suppose ... short ones: Although Goold Brown's unoffending four-page note on versification served Poe as whipping boy, he apparently used it extensively. Greenwood provides the documentation. The relevant passage here reads, “In poetry, every syllable is considered to be either long or short. A long syllable is reckoned to be equal to two short ones” (Rationale, 104, 105n35, 181).

25

all the feet of the Greek Prosodies: Such works list twenty-eight different kinds of feet. But Greenwood shows that they were not compiled as “a key to the rational analysis of Greek or Latin verses”; they were rather “a mechanical aid for [page 132:] students attempting to write their own verses.” They provided tables of words of the right number of syllables and syllable-lengths for each category, which schoolboys could then use to fill out “correct” lines (Rationale, 105n37).

28

the “Clouds” of Aristophanes: In “Pinakidia” item 100 (Southern Literary Messenger, Aug. 1836), Poe wrote, “In the ‘Nubes’ of Aristophanes, there are several Greek verses in rhyme.” Poe reuses here some material from “Marginalia” item 146, a brief note on rhyme that he published in Graham's (March 1846). See Collected Writings, vol. 2, for discussion of Poe's shifty statements on the subject and for the scholarly debate concerning the existence of rhyme in classical times. See also our note for ¶162 in Eureka.

Roman poets ... employ it: Rhyme in classical Latin poems is an occasional rhetorical device; it never appears in regular patterns. Indeed, it is utilized as often in prose as poetry, and its use is roughly analogous to our use of alliteration. Regular poetic rhyme in Latin appears in Medieval Latin only after the tenth century. See next item.

Parturiunt ... mus: A misquotation, possibly a printer's error, of Horace, Ars poetica, line 139, which reads, “Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus” (The mountains will labor; a silly little mouse will be born). There is also an apparent error in Greenwood's Rationale: “Parturiant.” Horace used future tense, “parturient.”

Litoreis ... sus: From Virgil's Aeneid [[Aeneid]], III, line 390: “Under the oak trees by the bank was found a big sow.” Poe liked Latin wordplay connected to pigs. See the motto to his “A Tale of Jerusalem” (1832), a satire that uses a collage of extracts from a best-selling novel of the period. The wordplay there involves a bilingual triple pun (Short Fiction, 4 20n1; Collected Works, 2:4-5, esp. 48n1).

29

Hebrew ... rhyme: Poe gleaned this from James Montgomery's lecture 5, “The Form of Poetry,” in Montgomery's Lectures on Poetry and General Literature Delivered at the Royal Institution in 1830 and 1831 (London, 1831). There was a pirated U.S. edition from 1833 on. Poe had used the material before, in “Pinakidia” item 77 (TOM; Collected Writings, 2). Had he looked instead into one of his favorite purveyors of literary odds and ends, Isaac Disraeli, he would have found quite the opposite: The New York 1841 edition of Disraeli's Amenities of Literature tells us that “[Claude] Fauchet, the old Gaulish antiquary, was startled to find that rhyme had been practised by the primitive Hebrews!” (Greenwood, in Rationale, 107, 109). The structure of Hebrew, in fact, makes rhyme very easy to create; a wide variety of rhyme — end, internal, multiple, and so forth — is used, for example, in the prayer books of American Conservative Jews.

30

Virginal ... Beautiful: Poe composed his own example, but TOM thinks he was hearing Alfred Tennyson's “Lilian” (1830) in his ear as he wrote. “Lilian” is not rhythmically similar to Poe's lines, though it uses a wide range of rhythms for so brief a poem. It is very different in mood. “Airy, fairy Lilian / Flitting, fairy Lilian” is a tease; the speaker concludes of her laughing,

Producing verse in complex patterns is easier, of course, if the poet issues himself a broad license to coin: “humblily” and “saintlily” are Poe's own inventions (Pollin, Poe, Creator of Words).

31

Here ... one: Poe is not only tiresome here but also imprecise. A patient gloss of this paragraph by Greenwood appears in Rationale. “Proportional equality” just means “proportion.” “Proportional equality as regards numbers” means less than it suggests.

32

Poe's note: Poe is being stuffy and overly technical. He is technically correct, but the common usage does not confuse readers; Shakespeare, Addison, and others cheerfully assume readers will know what they mean.

35

a breath ... made: From Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74), “The Deserted Village,” line 54 (TOM). Poe quotes accurately except for failing to capitalize the initial word.

the unimaginable might of Jove: A line perhaps suggested by Wordsworth's “Or the unimaginable touch of time,” the last line of “Mutability” (1822), one of Wordsworth's “Ecclesiastical Sonnets” (TOM).

Can it be ... madden it?: Probably composed as an example by Poe; see the next paragraph (“I have exemplified”). The philosophical and theological implications of these lines seem very important; they bear on what Melville called “The Ambiguities.” Tucking so powerful an issue into an illustration puts one in mind of Thorstein Veblen hiding major targets in his footnotes.

39

oh thou ... easy chair: Poe quotes Alexander Pope's Dunciad (1728), Book I, lines 19-22. With spelling, indentations, capitalization, and punctuation restored, they read,

Poe used the same lines in his review “Bryant's Poems” in the January 1837 Southern Literary Messenger to make much the same point: “The deviations ... from the strict rules of prosodial art, are but improvements upon the rigor of those rules, and are a merit, not a fault.”

“By a ... iambus”: Poe quotes Goold Brown with only minor changes up to the word trochee. The changes: Poe added the italics on “synzeresis.” Brown had a semicolon after “iambus” and a comma after “dactyl.” The last sentence is not in Brown, but Poe might have found similar statements in any number of other places. Greenwood notes that in Erastus Everett, A System of English Versification (1848), for instance, we are told that the trochee “has a peculiar beauty” used at the start of a line of iambic pentameter.”

41

variation was the object ... bastard iambus: Poets call problems such as that posed for Poe by the name Rabelais worse things than Poe suggests. Most critics find Poe's reasoning throughout this essay forced and fussy; here, where he introduces what he intends to be a new principle, he bases his introduction on [page 134:] the extremely doubtful argument that Pope introduced the name Rabelais to produce an “agreeable variation.” Most readers recognize the result as one of those small awkwardnesses that sometimes even great poets cannot avoid. Pope might well have preferred to write, “Or laugh and shake in Sandra's easy chair,” which reads better, picks up the a sound of “Cervantes,” and includes two of the s sounds with which he plays in the line. But Sandra, whoever she may be, did not write Rabelais’ oeuvre, and its presence is precisely what Pope wants to evoke in his line. So he accepts a clumsy moment and builds a stronger line.

43

About ... Poems: Poe's facts are correct. The editors were Charles Fenno Hoffman (1806-64) and Park Benjamin (1809-64). The review of the poems of Nathaniel Parker Willis appeared in the September 1836 issue, and was thought to be the work of Benjamin (TOM). It is entitled “Willis's Poems” and reviews Melanie and Other Poems edited by Barry Cornwall. When Poe wrote his review of Bryant, which intersects with “The Rationale of Verse” (see our note for ¶39), Poe also commented on that review, further evidence of his habit of reusing material even when his ideas had developed. For Poe on N. P. Willis, see his satiric tales “The Duc De L’Omelette” (1832; Short Fiction, 354, 388-90, 425-27, esp. 426nn2, 4, and 8, 427nn9 and 16; Thirty-Two Stories, 9-15, esp. 9, 1inn3, 4, and 5, 12nn8 and 9, 14n16; Collected Works, 2:31-41, esp. 38n8) and “Some Passages in the Life of a Lion” (1835; Short Fiction, 354-55, 390-93, 428-,30, esp. 428n6 and 430n26; Collected Works, 2:169-87, esp. 170, 185n13). Poe teased Willis but throughout his career generally treated him well. Willis's career connects to Poe's at any number of points. Willis came very close to fighting a duel with Frederick Marryat, for example. Poe was very interested in Marryat and was likely strongly influenced by him in his best-known literary satire, “How to Write a Blackwood Article”/”A Predicament” (1838; Levine and Levine, “‘How to’ Satire”). Poe admired Willis's work though he felt that Willis's fame (he was a “literary lion”) rested in part on his extensive literary contacts. The review (it is the lead article in that September 1836 number, facing an elaborately engraved portrait of Shakespeare) covers so many of Poe's favorite topics — literary puffing, the influence of the “Cockney School” (called here “the High Cockney school”), the danger of pandering to British tastes and favor — that one realizes how closely tied is Poe's prose to the magazine journalism of his day. A rich source of information on the media world of Poe's time is Baker's Sentiment and Celebrity.

“the Heroic... syllables”: Although the review of Willis complains about Willis's versification, this quotation does not appear in it.

“That ... love”: From Willis's “Hagar in the Wilderness,” line 47, in his book Melanie (London, 1835; New York, 1837). Poe added the italics, but see below.

“In ... storm”: From Willis's “Extract from a Poem Delivered at the Departure of the Senior Class of Yale College in 1827,” from Poems of Early and Later Years (Philadelphia, 1848). Poe added the italics. See below.

“With its ... hair”: From Willis's “Dawn” in Melanie. Poe added the italics. See below.

Poe's judgment of Willis's control seems justified. In his edition, Greenwood (Rationale, 119) quotes the passages from which Poe's examples are taken; we reproduce one as a sample: [page 135:]

Curiously, as Greenwood observes, the three examples Poe quotes are not quoted in the review with which Poe is quarreling (Rationale). But the author of that review quoted similar lines (six lines, for instance, which use the word delicate) and, like Poe, italicized the word with which he was concerned.

44

Mr. Horne ... “Orion”: Richard Henry (“Hengist”) Horne (1803-84). In the March 1844 Graham's Magazine, Poe praised Orion (1843); he and Horne corresponded (TOM).

“Chaucer Modernized”: Horne was the editor of The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, Modernized (London, 1841). The volume contains modernized versions by Horne himself, William Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and others as well as the introduction (see the next item).

anomalous foot: Pages xli-xci of Horne's introduction in the Chaucer volume are mainly “devoted ... to the eleventh syllable” (Rationale, 117n70).

the common idea ... “a grace”: Horne writes, “Instead of trusting to the ear for rhythm, and the understanding for the accent or pause, they counted ten upon their fingers, and denounced every thing (unless restrained by the authority of some great name), which did not answer the natural expectations of confirmed habit” (Rationale, 117n71).

45

I cannot say ... made: Scholars of metrics point out that Poe is wrong and accuse him of ignorance. It is likely that he simply could not think of examples and so assumed that he had invented something metrically new.

Dim ... sea: Poe quotes lines 253-56 of his poem (1829-), altering two lines so that this version is different from any of the revised versions listed in Stovall.

In the 1845 text from The Raven and Other Poems, the last two lines read,

46

bouleversement: Poe, who knew little French, liked this word and used it a number of times, generally in humorous situations. See the footnote Poe added to ¶149 in Eureka and our note on it in our edition of Eureka.

47

Many a memory: The printer's inability to reproduce Poe's intention is especially notable here; as his prose makes clear, he intended [page 136:]

The line seems to be by Poe, written to illustrate his point. Greenwood (Rationale, 120) noticed the typographical lapse also. See our list of variants for more information (¶47, variant c).

49

Cranch: (1813-92), whose middle name should be spelled “Pearse.”

Many ... losing: Poe quotes the opening lines of “My Thoughts,” which in Rufus Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America (1842) had a comma after “swift.” Cranch later revised the lines, using a comma after “musing” and the word bright instead of strange (Rationale) when he published “My Thoughts” in Poems (Philadelphia, 1844). Poe commented on Cranch, a Virginia painter and Transcendental poet, elsewhere as well. There is an item about him in “The Literati” (Godey's Lady's Book, July 1846; Complete Works, 15:69-72) in which Poe first is terribly condescending (“one of the least intolerable of the school of Boston transcendentalists”), then offers guarded praise for Cranch's work since Cranch left the Transcendental circle. Nothing in the 1846 item suggests that Cranch is among “our finest poets.” There is also a precursor of the present passage in “Marginalia” item 175 (Collected Writings, 2: 289-91).

“scanning by accents”: In the preface to his “Christabel” (1816), Coleridge said that “the metre of Christabel is not ... irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle: namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. Nevertheless, this occasional variation in number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of convenience, but in correspondence with some transition in the nature of the imagery or passion.” Poe treats Coleridge less respectfully in his later criticism than he did in his earlier.

50

It is ... at once: “The Rationale of Verse” is notable not only for its pedantry but also for its mean-spiritedness (see especially ¶100 and our note). In order to snipe at Coleridge, Poe contradicts what he has said in the previous paragraph where he forgives Cranch for an opening line the rhythmic intent of which one cannot catch “at once.”

51

Pease: The nursery rhyme likely came to Poe's mind because of his mistaken version of Christopher “Pease” Cranch's middle name. See our note for ¶49. as obscure as an explanatory note: In a letter to Miss Susan V. C. Ingram of Norfolk, Virginia, on September 10, 1849, Poe tells his friend why he will not explain what his poem “Ulalume” means: “I remembered Dr. Johnson's bitter and rather just remark about the folly of explaining what, if worth explanation, should explain itself. He has a happy witticism, too, about some book which he calls ‘as obscure as an explanatory note’” (TOM).

53-54

αστρολογς (astrologos): Poe is wrong; the astrologos is not a Greek term describing a rhythmic unit in poetry. Rather, it is an ordinary word used as an illustration because it has the right number of syllables and pattern of stress so that it can be used to demonstrate such a unit. In Charles Anthon's A System of Greek Prosody and Metre ... (New York, 1842) it is used to illustrate παιών (in Latin paeon primus) — a rhythm scanned,  ̄ ̆ ̆ ̆. Poe might simply [page 137:] have skimmed Anthon and misunderstood it (Rationale). This passage in “The Rationale of Verse” is an expansion of material used in the “Marginalia” item (number 175) that discusses Cranch. See Collected Writings, 2:289-91.

57

iambuses: The Southern Literary Messenger reads “iambus,” an error, apparently — the other feet in Poe's list are given in the plural. See the list of variants.

Mrs. Welby: Mrs. Amelia B. Welby (1819-52). Poe praised her work several times (an account is in Collected Writings, 2:207), perhaps, Pollin speculates, because he was “charmed by her being Southern.” She certainly isn’t very good. Greenwood (Rationale, 71-73n63) gives a solid account of her work, of Poe's reviews, and of her versification.

I have ... old: This line does not seem to be by Mrs. Welby; Poe apparently cobbled it together from several different lines of her “The Little Step-Son” in Poems by Amelia (New York, 1844, but dated 1845):

Poe's alteration of “five” to “three” might be just bad memory (perhaps that accounts for his faulty quotation as a whole), or it might be a private joke, picking up what he had said in the last sentence of ¶54, “that three and five are one and the same thing.”

Pale ... Gray: A poem by Henry B. Hirst, “Everard Grey” ran in Snowden's Ladies Companion (Oct. 1843) and was collected in Hirst's The Coming of the Mammoth (Boston, 1845). Poe reviewed it and alluded to Hirst's work several times (Pollin, Dictionary). It contains much of the material out of which Poe apparently created his line:

We guess that the change from “Everard” to “Emily” is connected to the last example — “Amelia” might have put “Emily” in his head. Poe's satiric mean streak may also be operating. He knew Hirst very well; their friendship had had its ups and downs, and the idea of creating a line out of scraps from Hirst, a line without context, may have tickled him. He did such things. See the satirical story “A Tale of Jerusalem” (1832), a collage of snippets cut from a best-selling novel of the day, pasted together with wicked effect (Short Fiction, 352-53,420-22; Collected Works, 2, 41-51). The genre survives, as in the Woody Allen movie What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966).

59

The water lily ... lake: These are the first two lines of “The Water Lily” from Godey's Lady's Book (Dec. 1846). Both lines end in commas in the original, and Water Lily is written with initial capitals. The poem, reprinted in Rationale, is controlled, well conceived, technically proficient, and trite. One wonders what [page 138:] Poe really thought of it, what is the tone of voice in his comment that it is “quite a pretty specimen of verse.”

60

Byron's ... tell: Some of the differences between Poe's version of the opening lines of Byron's poem and versions in modern editions of Byron are the result of alterations at several dates by Byron; others are errors by Poe or his printer. Our chart compares Poe's to the 1813 book version, The Bride of Abdyos: A Turkish Tale (London, 1813); to the Paris edition of 1831 (The Works of Lord Byron / Including / The Suppressed Poems / Complete in One Volume); and then with the much later edition of Byron's Works edited by Ernest H. Coleridge (London, 1900), which Greenwood quotes in Rationale. Poe plainly saw a version revised from the first publication but seems to have introduced errors and variations of his own. Greenwood does not mention that Poe left out three lines, though he quotes the complete passage from the 1900 Works in his notes to Poe's “Notes upon English Verse.” Poe's manuscript of that document has survived and shows that Poe skipped the lines or perhaps followed an edition that we have not seen in which they were missing.

line		Poe (Griswold ed.) 1850		Byron  1813		Byron  1831		Byron  1900
2		clime —		clime,		clime?		clime?
3		vulture,		vulture —		vulture,		vulture,
3		turtle,		turtle —		turtle,		turtle,
4		softness,		sorrow —		sorrow,		sorrow,
4		crime?		crime? —		crime?		crime?
5		vine,		vine?		vine,		vine,
6		shine,		shine		shine;		shine;
7		And		Where		Where		Where
7		Zephyr,		Zephyr,		Zeyhyr, [a typo]		Zephyr,
7		oppressed		oppressed		oppress'd		oppressed
8		Gul		Gül		Gul		Gül
8		their		her		her		her
8		bloom?		bloom;		bloom;		bloom;
9		fruit		fruit,		fruit,		fruit,
10		mute —		mute;		mute;		mute;
		Poe omits lines 11-13; in the 1813 version these read:
11		Where the tints of the earth, and the hues of the sky,
12		In colour though varied, in beauty may vie,
13		And the purple of Ocean is deepest in die;
[13		omitted		Ocean		ocean		Ocean]
[13		omitted		die		dye		dye]
15		all		all,		all,		all,
15		man		man,		man,		man,
15		divine?		divine —		divine?		divine — [page 139:]
16		the land of		the clime of		the clime of		the clime
		the East —		the east —		the east;		of the East —
16		The clime of		the land of		the land of		the land
		Sun —		the Sun —		the sun —		of Sun —
Our B text (Southern Literary Messenger) reads,
‘Tis the land of the East — ‘Tis the land of the Sun —
We follow C (Griswold). When the quotation is repeated in ¶62, B also agrees with C.
18		Oh,		Oh!		Oh!		Oh!
18		Oh,		Oh!		Oh!		Oh!
19		that		which		which		which
19		that		which		which		which

Thinking that perhaps some American edition of Byron might have omitted lines 11-13, we examined several. The lines were not missing. Plainly, though, Byron's poem existed in numerous slightly different versions. In a Philadelphia edition of 1834 loaned to us by James Seaver, The Works of Lord Byron, Including the Suppressed Poems; also, A Sketch of His Life, by J. W. Lake, for example, line 4 ends, “crime!” and the rare word in line 8 reads “Gull.” James Seaver also owns an 1841 Paris volume from the publisher, A. and W. Galignani, of the 1831 book used in our variants chart above (The Complete Works of Lord Byron, Reprinted from the Last London Edition.) It varies in small details from each of the others. The variations in Poe are more serious than those in the editions of Byron.

61

dactylic “measure” ... rhyme: Goold Brown's Institutes had this to say on the subject: “Full dactylic generally forms triple rhyme. When one of the final short syllables is omitted, the rhyme is double; when both, single.” Brown goes on to note, “Dactylic measure is uncommon; and, when employed, is seldom perfectly regular” (Rationale, 128, 129n22, 181-85). His simple statement really covers all that Poe argues about so vehemently in the discussion of authorities’ opinions about Byron's lines.

“When ... hypermeter”: See our note for ¶4.

62

Zephyr oppressed by perfume: An error Poe failed to catch; the line as he quotes it in ¶60 reads “oppressed with perfume.”

63

rhythm ... feet: Prescott (Selections) and Greenwood (Rationale) use sources that say Poe is wrong, that “rhythm” comes from ρ́υθνός, that is, motion or flow. our Prosodies admit such: Goold Brown gives examples of one-foot lines in each of the feet he discusses. His dactylic example is,

72

forty-one: Because the Southern Literary Messenger printed fewer, we assume its printer could not follow Poe's intentions, and we have added the missing marks.

73

go hand in hand: Poe uses the same phrase in his cosmological treatise/”prose poem” Eureka at a parallel point in his argument. See our edition of Eureka ¶133 and our introduction to “The Rationale of Verse.” See also our note for ¶81.

74

Mæcenas ... Deos: Poe has quoted (accurately) Horace, Carmina, I, 1, a [page 140:] dedication to Maecenas. The sense of the passage is, “There are people who think, if they have won a chariot race, they are divine.” More literally, “Maecenas, descended from ancestral kings, O, both my protection and my sweet ornament [or “glory” — there is no precise English equivalent in one word], there are those whom it pleases to have collected the dust of Olympia in the race course, and avoided the turning post by burning chariot wheels, and the noble palm [of victory] raises the masters of the lands to the gods.” Chariot racing was an aristocratic sport, so only the “masters of the land” could afford to race. Chariot drivers would try to come as close to the turning post as possible without hitting it.

79

Baconially: Poe means to reinforce “deduced”; Baconian logic he views as deductive, not inductive. But the odd word suggests some sarcasm; see what Poe says about Bacon in Eureka, ¶13 and explanatory note. The joke about Bacon at that point in Eureka is shared with Poe's satiric tale “Mellonta Tauta” (1849; Thirty-Two Stories, 346-60, esp. 351n8; Short Fiction, 547-48, 588-96, 616-19, esp. 617n8; Collected Works, 3:1289-309, esp. 1307n21). See the list of textual variants, too, for Poe may have intended to cut “Baconially” from his text.

80

Alfred B. Street: (1811-81). Poe's other references to Street are listed in Collected Writings, 2: 278.

His ... round: From Street's “The Lost Hunter,” which appears in Rufus Griswold's The Poets and Poetry of America (1842) and in Street's collection, Poems (1845). Greenwood, in Rationale, shows Poe's slight alteration and completes the sentence:

a “fine frenzy”: See A Midsummer Night's Dream V, i. See also “The Philosophy of Composition,” ¶5 and our note to it.

81

mesmeric balloons: Poe is not being entirely facetious. Transportation by balloon seemed about to become practical as well as feasible. In 1836, Monck Mason flew from London to Weilburg, Germany. Poe paid close attention and produced three stories utilizing travel by balloon. One, the satirical fantasy “Hans Pfaal — A Tale” (1835, 1840; Short Fiction, 547, 558-88, 613-616; Collected Writings, 1:365-506), preceded Mason's flight. The second, the clever journalistic fraud now called “The Balloon-Hoax” (1844; Thirty-Two Stories, 27-83; Short Fiction, 547, 549-57, 611-13; Collected Works, 3:1063-88), not only used data from Mason's trip but also introduced Mason and others involved in the 1836 adventure into the text. For the third, see the next item, “hudsonizing.” As for mesmerism, people of scientific and philosophical bent in Poe's era were certain that science was shortly going to succeed in linking the “spiritual” with the physical. Mesmerism, although it was falling from the hands of serious investigators into those of showmen, quacks, and charlatans, seemed nevertheless based on [page 141:] evidence of connections between human will and the material. “The Power of Words” (1845; Thirty-Two Stories, 318-22; Short Fiction, 107-8, 114-16, 145-46; Collected Works, 3, 1210-17) and several other of Poe's transcendental fictions deal with such linkage. So, of course, does Eureka, wherein Poe announces triumphantly, “The Body and The Soul walk hand in hand.” See our edition of Eureka, ¶133 passim and our note for ¶73 above. Thus speculation that balloons will move by mesmeric power is playful, but it is not pure whimsey.

hudsonizing: Poe intends a pun. To “hudsonize” is to Americanize (because of the name of the river), but it also refers to \the work of Henry Norman Hudson (1814-86), author of Lectures on Shakespeare (2d ed., New York, 1848). Poe several times criticized Hudson's work, complaining of “an elocution that would disgrace a pig.” See Collected Writings, 2:251 for a guide to Poe's references to Hudson. There was probably also an association in Poe's mind between “Hudson,” “American-ness,” and “balloons”: See “Mellonta Tauta” (1849), a tale set in the future in which balloon voyagers of 2848 minimize American achievement of Poe's day; the river is mentioned.

85

I never do so: “Poe has avoided false quantities in dactyls by the admirable expedient of not composing in dactyls” (Rationale, 145).

“Thanatopsis”: Bryant's best-known poem (ca. 1815, published in 1817, much revised by 1821) is in decasyllabic verse, iambic pentameter, but there are, of course, many lines that contain varied rhythms. Impatient with Poe's pendantry, most modern readers using the simple scansion usually taught today would scan the opening regular lines

There are possible quibbles — one might feel that “she speaks” needs to “hover” more than an iamb suggests. Plainly one needs a different pattern to describe

“Into his” looks much like a dactyl — so does “come like a,” though there are other ways that one could scan either line. So with “Over thy spirit.” It is not worth a quarrel; say that the poem generally uses ten syllables and five accents or beats to the line and one has said all that most readers want to know; the names and laws are less important than the poet's skill in making sound, rhythm, and sense serve the intended purpose. Poe speaks so sensibly as a poet in other essays that it is hard to see why he wants to replace one body of intolerant pedantry (as he perceives it) with another. His general statements in this essay do not match his particular proscriptions. Greenwood's comments on Poe's January 1837 review of an edition of Bryant's poems (Rationale, 1-44) are useful; that review connects closely to “The Rationale of Verse.” [page 142:]

“Spanish Student”: “The Spanish Student” is a charming and light-weight verse drama that Poe denigrated elsewhere as well (because Longfellow borrowed the plot from Middleton's The Spanish Gypsy, that in turn based on Cervantes's “La Gitanilla”) (Arvin, Longfellow). It is in perfectly graceful blank verse and reads extremely well; one wonders what Poe is complaining about.

86

Litoreis ... sus; Parturiunt ... mus: Poe alludes to his discussion of these lines in ¶28. He (or someone at the magazine) alters the quotation — the “et” present in the ¶28 version of the line from Horace has disappeared, and “nascitur” is spelled “nascetur.” See our comments and notes on “The Poetic Principle” for possible reasons for variations in “quoted” material. As the list of variants shows, Poe or Griswold corrected this pair of errors, so it is likely that they are typos.

88

Integer ... pharetrâ: Horace Carmina, I, 22 (Rationale; TOM). Poe quotes the first stanza of what is now often given the title, “From the Righteous Man, Even the Wild Beasts Run Away.” Poe's “Mauri jaculis” is unsyntactical; the words should read “Mauris iaculis.”

91

French heroic ... spondaic: French heroic verse is not spondaic. See the next items.

French language ... no accentuation: Poe puts this very oddly but is essentially correct. The unstressed syllables we know in English poetry do not appear in French verse (there is a slight exception that can occur at the end of a line); there is even stress throughout the line. French does include a slightly heavy accent on the last syllable of a unit — a word, phrase, or sentence — any time that a pause is coming. (Linguists indicate a pause thus: # #.) This is true of French prose, poetry, and speech. The spondee is not charactistic [[characteristic]] of French; it is a metric foot. French verse runs on syllables, not feet. Poe in this paragraph tries to impose English metrics on a language that does not have meter, making the same sort of error which he elsewhere complains others do when they try to impose Latin metrics on English.

93

In paragraph 78 of “Notes upon English Verse” Poe appends a note that reads, “Even the regular dactyl in the penultimate foot is often displaced by a spondee, in Latin Hexameters.” “Dactylic hexameter” is the term traditionally applied to the meter of ancient epic verse. Poe's contention that the intention of the meter is spondaic is doubtful.

95

Sir Philip Sidney: Poe leans here upon material he used in “Pinakidia” item 75 (1836) and “Marginalia” item 133 (1845). Collected Writings, 2:2-33, discusses his source, which is James Montgomery's Lectures on Poetry ... (London, 1831).

Professor Longfellow: Poe echoes “Marginalia” item 133 again. Pollin's notes include the funny response Longfellow wrote in his diary,

and further explain context (see the previous item). [page 143:]

Professor Felton: Cornelius Conway Felton (1807-62), who discussed Longfellow's “English hexameters on the model of the Greek” in his review of Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems in The North American Review 55 (1842). Greenwood adds, “Between 1842 and 1848 Felton, perhaps influenced by Longfellow, revised his opinion of the English hexameter” (Rationale, 149). In an 1848 North American Review piece, Felton “opines that the English hexameter is not a bastard form of verse; that Longfellow excells” in writing it. Felton then defines it:

Frogpondian: Poe's pejorative slang for “connected with the city of Boston.” There was a frog pond in Boston Common. Poe refers to the “Frog Pond” repeatedly. See, for instance, his two late satirical tales: “X-ing a Paragrab” (1849; Short Fiction, 357, 410-14, 436-37, esp. 436n7; Collected Works, 3:1367-76, esp. 1367n11) and “Mellonta Tauta” (1849; Thirty-Two Stories, 346-60; Short Fiction, 547-48, 588-96, 616-19; and Collected Works, 3, 1289-309).

In placing ... the former: Greenwood (Rationale) is sure Poe is wrong through ignorance of typography. We looked at editions that place Greek and English versions of the same poems side by side; in these, the Greek generally looks shorter. See, for instance, the lines of poetry that are quoted in Demetrius, On Style in the Loeb Classical Library edition (London, 1927), 298-99, 368-69, or 382-83. The “cheat” there, of course, is that the translations are not necessarily imitations of the ancient meter.

96

Also the church ... benches: Poe quotes Longfellow's translation of “Nattvardsbarnen” (Children of the Lord's Supper) by Esaias Tegnér (1782-1846), a Swedish Lutheran bishop. Poe generally left out Longfellow's commas; he also capitalized the word heaven. Greenwood quotes both Longfellow and the Swedish original (Rationale, 81n82).

100

Pundits: There are enough shared allusions and shared unusual vocabulary to suggest a fairly strong tie between this essay and “Mellonta Tauta” (1849); see our notes to paragraphs 79, 81, and 95. In that story, Pundit is the historian husband of Pundita, whose letter forms the text of the satiric story. Pundit is a great authority of the year 2848, but he is very often wrong.

fat old Jew: Almost alone among major American writers of his era, Poe was a bigot and a snob. His work shows dislike or contempt for blacks, Jews, the Irish,/ and other ethnic groups and nationalities. Although biases crop up occasionally in the work of even writers such as Melville, who systematically set out to combat bigotry, Poe's case is different; with him, bigotry is the rule. This ugliest of his essays thus ends on an especially ugly note. For diverse viewpoints on Poe's racism see Romancing the Shadow, ed. Kennedy and Weissberg.